Zeynep Tufekci: belief

Transcript context

…For those few people in the room who have never read Weber, what’s the right way to get started? I think the best way is to not read Weber because you do not want to start there. Seriously, the language is so complicated, but I have a colleague — I’ve never been in his department, but George Ritzer was a sociologist. He wrote a lot of theory books, and they’re really good. I believe he has one called McDonaldization of Society that’s very much a Weberian rationalization, but he has many other things as well. I would read someone like George Ritzer to read about Weber because his books are a lot more accessible. You might like reading Ritzer. I learned probability theory from a book in Turkish. It only exists in Turkish. It’s written by someone from Turkey. The premise of the book is, there’s a little girl who wants to win at a game of dice, and she loses because she’s betting the wrong way. Then she meets someone who says, “I can teach you how to win this game.” Then the book — it’s just a novel; I still have the book; it’s amazing — walks you through probability theory, including, I think, the binomial theorem. It’s something you can read when you’re in the third grade and understand. At the end of the book, the little girl discovers that there are textbooks, and she says, “That’s probability. I hate it. My older sister reads it and hates it.” The person in the neighborhood who has been teaching her says, “That’s because you have this preconception that theory is something boring and dry. Probability is something boring and dry and complicated instead of, as we were talking, something really exciting. Understanding a bit better about probability and probabilistic thinking is really empowering and fascinating.” That’s the way I feel about sociology — that it’s actually, conceptually, really powerful, but the theory part can be really dry. If you read it from an early 19th-century person, that person is talking about early 19th century. That’s boring and dry and crazy to you. Whereas, what you need is somebody to do it now. Ritzer does it for the 20th century, and it’s really good. All his books are good. I’m not sure if somebody’s updated it because, with the internet and stuff, we have 21st-century stuff to bring in, but they’re still equally valid, like institutions and the way they work. Humans are remarkably human. Question from the iPad — how would you convince a COVID vaccine skeptic?…

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